Who Is Robert Joseph?by Justin Raimondo
July 18, 2003

The
government official responsible for inserting those inflammatory 16
words about the Niger-uranium-Iraqi WMD connection in George W. Bush's
state of the union speech turns
out to have been one Robert
Joseph, according to scattered
but widespreadreports.
To those familiar with the factional alignments inside the Bush administration,
this hardly comes as a surprise.

Joseph
is the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for
Proliferation Strategy, Counterproliferation and Homeland Defense,
and a key member of the neoconservative
group in the administration. As
Dana Milbank pointed out in the Washington Post [May 14,
2002]:

"[Richard]
Perle's allies favor a more hawkish foreign policy and an inclination
for the United States to go it alone. Perle's lineup of like-minded
thinkers is impressive, starting with Vice President Cheney. The vice
president sometimes stays neutral, but his sympathies undoubtedly
are with the Perle crowd. Cheney deputies Lewis "Scooter"
Libby and Eric Edelman relay neoconservative views to Rice at the
National Security Council. At the NSC, they have a sympathetic audience
in Elliott Abrams, Robert Joseph, Wayne Downing and Zalmay Khalilzad."

"At
this writing, twenty-two CSP advisers  including additional Reagan-era
remnants like Elliott Abrams, Ken deGraffenreid, Paula Dobriansky,
Sven Kraemer, Robert Joseph, Robert Andrews and J.D. Crouch  have reoccupied
key positions in the national security establishment, as have other
true believers of more recent vintage."

Joseph
is among the chief advocates of "counter-proliferation,"
 as opposed to "non-proliferation,"  which seeks
to use the issue of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons as a
pretext for war rather than a reason to engage in disarmament negotiations.
If a dangerous wackiness is a general characteristic of the neocons
in government, then surely the National
Institute for Public Policy's 2001 report "Rationale and
Requirements for U.S. Nuclear Forces and Arms Control," in which
Joseph collaborated, bore all the hallmarks. As William
Hartung and Michelle Ciarrocca put it, the report recommends "developing
a new generation of 'usable' lower-yield nuclear weapons, expanding
the U.S. nuclear 'hit list' and expanding the set of scenarios in
which nuclear weapons may be used."